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One Man in His Time, a novel by Ellen Glasgow |
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Chapter 4. The Tribal Instinct |
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_ CHAPTER IV. THE TRIBAL INSTINCT The spirit of the age, the worship of the many-headed god of magnitude, was holding carnival in the town. Faster and faster buildings were rising; the higher and more flimsily built, the better it seemed, for it is easier to demolish walls that have been lightly erected. Everywhere people were pushing one another into the slums or the country. Everywhere the past was going out with the times and the future was coming on in a torrent. Two opposing principles, the conservative and the progressive, had struggled for victory, and the progressive principle had won. To add more and more numbers; to build higher and higher; to push harder and harder; and particularly to improve what had been already added or built or pushed--these impulses had united at last into a frenzied activity. And while the building and the pushing and the improving went on, the village grew into the town, the town grew into the city, and the city grew out into the country. Beneath it all, informing the apparent confusion, there was some crude belief that the symbol of material success is size, and that size in itself, regardless of quality or condition, is civilization. For the many-headed god is a god of sacrifice. He makes a wilderness of beauty and calls it progress. Long ago the village had disappeared. Long ago the spacious southern homes, with their walled gardens of box and roses and aromatic shrubs in spring, had receded into the shadowy memories of those whom the modern city pointed out, with playful solicitude, as "the oldest inhabitants." None except the very oldest inhabitants could remember those friendly and picturesque streets, deeply shaded by elms and sycamores; those hospitable houses of gray stucco or red brick which time had subdued to a delicate rust-colour; those imposing Doric columns, or quaint Georgian doorways; those grass-grown brick pavements, where old ladies in perpetual mourning gathered for leisurely gossip; those wrought-iron gates that never closed; those unshuttered windows, with small gleaming panes, which welcomed the passer-by in winter; or those gardens, steeped in the fragrance of mint and old-fashioned flowers, which allured the thirsty visitor in summer. These things had vanished years ago; yet beneath the noisy commercial city the friendly village remained. There were hours in the lavender-tinted twilights of spring, or on autumn afternoons, while the shadows quivered beneath the burnished leaves and the sunset glowed with the colour of apricots, when the watcher might catch a fleeting glimpse of the past. It may have been the drop of dusk in the arched recess of a Colonial doorway; it may have been the faint sunshine on the ivy-grown corner of an old brick wall; it may have been the plaintive melody of a negro market-man in the street; or it may have been the first view of the Culpeper's gray and white mansion; but, in one or all of these things, there were moments when the ghost of the buried village stirred and looked out, and a fragrance that was like the memory of box and mint and blush roses stole into the senses. It was then that one turned to the Doric columns of the Culpeper house, standing firmly established in its grassy lawn above the street and the age, and reflected that the defeated spirit of tradition had entrenched itself well at the last. Time had been powerless against that fortress of prejudice; against that cheerful and inaccessible prison of the tribal instinct. Poverty, the one indiscriminate leveller of men and principles, had never attacked it, for in the lean years of Reconstruction, when to look well fed was little short of a disgrace in Virginia, an English cousin, remote but clannish, had died at an opportune moment and left Mr. Randolph Byrd Culpeper a moderate fortune. Thanks to this event, which Mrs. Culpeper gratefully classified as the "intervention of Providence," the family had scarcely altered its manner of living in the last two hundred years. To be sure there were modern discomforts which related to the abolition of slavery and the prohibition of whiskey; but since the Culpepers had been indulgent masters and light drinkers, they had come to regard these deprivations as in the nature of blessings. Solid, imposing, and as richly endowed as an institution of learning, the Culpeper generations had weathered both the restraints and the assaults of the centuries. The need to make a living, that grim necessity which is the mother of democracy, had brushed them as lightly as the theory of evolution. Saturated with tradition as with an odour, and fortified by the ponderous moral purpose of the Victorian age, they had never doubted anything that was old and never discovered anything that was new. About them as about the hidden village, there was the charm of mellowness, of unruffled serenity. Some ineradicable belief in things as they have always been had preserved them from the aesthetic derangement of the Mid-Victorian taste; and in standing for what was old, they had stood, inadvertently but courageously, for what was excellent. Security, permanence, possession--all the instincts which blend to make the tribe and the community, all the agencies which work for organized society and against the wayward experiment in human destiny--these were the stubborn forces embodied in the Culpeper stock. The present head of the family, that Randolph Byrd Culpeper who had been only ten years old when Providence intervened, was now a fine-looking, heavily built man of sixty-five, with prominent dark eyes under sleepy lids, abundant iron-gray hair which was brushed until it shone, and a drooping moustache that was still as brown as it had been in his youth. He had an impressive though stolid bearing, an amiable expression, an engaging smile, and the manner of a weary monarch. It was his boast that he had never done anything for the first time without ascertaining precisely how it had been done by the highest authority before him. Devoid of even the rudiments of an imagination, he had never been visited in a nightmare by the suspicion that the name of Culpeper was not the best result of the best of all possible worlds. As long as his prejudices were not offended his generosity was inexhaustible. For the rest, he bore his social position as reverently as if it were a plate in church, had never spoken a profane word or recognized a joke in his life, and still dined at two o'clock in the afternoon because his grandfather, who was dyspeptic by constitution, had been unable to digest a late dinner. At the time of his marriage, an unusually happy one, he was regarded as "the handsomest man of his day"; and he was still yearned over from a distance by elderly ladies of suppressed romantic temperaments. Mrs. Culpeper, a small imperious woman of distinguished lineage and uncertain temper, had gone through an entire life seeing only one thing at a time, and never seeing that one thing as it really was. If her husband embodied the moral purpose, she herself was an incarnation of the evasive idealism of the nineteenth century. Her universe was comprised in her family circle; her horizon ended with the old brick wall between the alley and the Culpepers' garden. All that related to her husband, her eight children and her six grandchildren, was not only of supreme importance and intense interest to her, but of unsurpassed beauty and excellence. It was intolerable to her exclusive maternal instinct that either virtue or happiness should exist in any degree, except a lesser measure, outside of her own household; and praise of another woman's children conveyed to her a secret disparagement of her own. Having naturally a kind heart she could forgive any sin in her neighbours except prosperity--though as Corinna had once observed, with characteristic flippancy, "Continual affliction was a high price to pay for Aunt Harriet's favour." In her girlhood she had been a famous beauty; and she was still as fine and delicately tinted as a carving in old ivory, with a skin like a faded microphylla rose-leaf, and stiff yellowish white hair, worn a la Pompadour. Her mind was thin but firm, and having received a backward twist in its youth, it had remained inflexibly bent for more than sixty years. Unlike her husband she was gifted with an active, though perfectly concrete imagination--a kind of superior magic lantern that shot out images in black and white on a sheet--and a sense of humour which, in spite of the fact that it lost its edge when it was pointed at the family, was not without practical value in a crisis. On the evening of Stephen's adventure in the Square, the Culpeper family had gathered in the front drawing-room, to await the arrival of a young cousin, whom, they devoutly hoped, Stephen would one day perceive the wisdom of marrying. The four daughters--Victoria, the eldest, who had nursed in France during the war; Hatty, who ought to have been pretty, and was not; Janet, who was candidly plain; and Mary Byrd, who would have been a beauty in any circle--were talking eagerly, with the innumerable little gestures which they had inherited from Mrs. Culpeper's side of the house. They adored one another; they adored their father and mother; they adored their three brothers and their married sister, whose name was Julia; and they adored every nephew and niece in the connection. Though they often quarrelled, being young and human, these quarrels rippled as lightly as summer storms over profound depths of devotion. "Oh, I do wish," said Mary Byrd, who had "come out" triumphantly the winter before, "that Stephen would marry Margaret." She was a slender graceful girl, with red-gold hair, which had a lustrous sheen and a natural wave in it, and the brown ox-like eyes of her father. There was a great deal of what Peyton, the second son, who lived at home, and was the most modern of the family, called "dash" about her. "It was the war that spoiled it," said Janet, the plain one, who possessed what her mother fondly described as "a charm that was all her own." "I sometimes think the war spoiled everything." At this Victoria, the eldest, demurred mildly. Ever since she had nursed in France, she had assumed a slightly possessive manner toward the war, as if she had in some mysterious way brought it into the world and was responsible for its reputation. She was tall and very thin, with a perfect complexion, a long nose, and a short upper lip which showed her teeth too much when she laughed. Her hair was fair and fluffy; and Mrs. Culpeper, who could not praise her beauty, was very proud of her "aristocratic appearance." "Why, he never even mentions the war," she protested. "I don't care. I believe he thinks about it," insisted Janet, who would never surrender a point after she had once made it. "He's different, anyhow," said Hatty, the one who had everything, as her mother asserted, to make her pretty, and yet wasn't. "He isn't nearly so normal. Is he, Mother?" Mrs. Culpeper raised troubled eyes from the skirt of her pale gray silk gown which she was scrutinizing dejectedly. "How on earth could I have got that spot there?" she remarked in her brisk yet soft voice. "I am afraid you are right, dear, about Stephen. He certainly hasn't been like himself for some time. I have felt really anxious, I suppose it was the war." While the war had lasted she had seen it, according to her habit of vision, with peculiar intentness, and she had seen nothing else; but from the beginning to the end, it had appeared to her mainly as an international disturbance which had upset the serene and regular course of her family affairs. For the past two years she had refused to think of it except under pressure; and then she recalled it only as the occasion when Victoria and Stephen had been in France, and poor Peyton in a training camp. Her feeling had been violent, but entirely personal, while Mr. Culpeper, who possessed the martial patriotism characteristic of Virginians of his class and generation, had been animated by the sacrificial spirit of a hero. "Oh, Stephen is all right," declared Peyton, who felt impelled to take the side of his brother in a family discussion. He was an incurious and gay young man, of active sporting interests and immaculate appearance, with so few of the moral attributes of the Culpepers that his mother sometimes wondered how he could possibly be the son of his father. Indeed there were times when this wonder extended to Mary Byrd, for it seemed incredible that anything so "advanced" as the outlook of these two should have been a legitimate offspring of either the Culpeper or the Warwick point of view. "He would be all right," maintained Janet, "if he would only marry Margaret. I am sure she likes him." "Oh, I don't know. There's that young clergyman," rejoined Hatty, "and Margaret is so pious. I suppose that's why she has never been popular with men." "My dear child," breathed Mrs. Culpeper in remonstrance, and she added emphatically, as if the doubt were a disparagement of Stephen's attractions, "Of course she likes him. Why, it would be a perfectly splendid marriage for Margaret Blair." "It isn't possible," asked Mary Byrd, for if her manners were modern, her prejudices were old-fashioned, "that Stephen could have met any one else over there?" She was wearing an elaborate, very short and very low gown of pink velvet, not one of the simple blue or gray silk dresses, with modest round necks, in which her sisters attired themselves in the evening. A little later she and Peyton would go on to a dance; for her mother's consternation when the frock had been unpacked from its Paris wrappings had been temporarily mitigated by the assertion that unless one danced in gowns like that, one simply couldn't be expected to dance at all. "Of course, if you wish me to be a wall-flower like Margaret Blair," Mary Byrd had protested with wounded dignity; and since Mrs. Culpeper wished nothing on earth so little as that, her only response had been, "Well, I hope to heaven that you won't let your father see it!" Now, as her husband was heard descending the stairs, she said hurriedly: "Mary Byrd, if you won't put a scarf over your knees, I wish you would wear one around your neck." "Oh, Father won't mind," retorted Mary Byrd flippantly. "He is a real sport, and he knows that you have to play the game well if you play it at all." Then turning with her liveliest air, she remarked as Mr. Culpeper entered: "Father, darling, I've just said that you were a sport." Mr. Culpeper surveyed her with portentous disapproval. He adored her, and she knew it, but because it was impossible for his features to wear any expression lightly, the natural gravity of his look deepened to a thundercloud. "Is Mary Byrd going in swimming?" he demanded not of his daughter, but of the family. "No, you precious, only in dancing," replied Mary Byrd, as she rose airily and placed a kiss above the thundercloud on his forehead. "Will you go looking like this?" "Not if I can possibly look any worse." She swayed like a golden lily before his astonished gaze. "Can you suggest any way that I might?" "I cannot." His face cleared under the kiss, and he held her at arm's length while paternal pride softened his look. "Do you really mean that you won't shock the young men away from you?" It was as near a jest as he had ever come, and a ripple of amusement passed over the room. "I may shock them, but not away." The girl was really a wonder. How in the world, he asked himself, did she happen to be his daughter? "Do you mean that all the other girls dress like this?" It was his final appeal to an arbitrary but acknowledged authority. "All the popular ones. You can't wish me to dress like the unpopular ones, can you?" His appeal had failed, and he accepted defeat with the sober courage his father had displayed in a greater surrender. "Well, I suppose if everybody does it, it is all right," he conceded; and though he was not aware of it, he had compressed into this convenient axiom his whole philosophy of conduct. As he crossed the room to the glowing fire and the black marble mantelpiece, which had supplanted the delicate Adam one of a less resplendent period, he wore an air that was at once gentle and haughty--the expression of a man who hopes that he is a Christian and knows that his blood is blue. "Hasn't Stephen come in yet?" he inquired of his wife. "I thought I heard him upstairs." She shook her head helplessly. "No, and I told him Margaret was coming. That is her ring now." Mr. Culpeper looked at Mary Byrd. "I am sure that Margaret would clothe herself more discreetly," he remarked in a voice which sounded husky because he tried to make it facetious. "When I was a young man it was the fashion to compare women to flowers, and in these unromantic days I should call Margaret our last violet--" A peal of laughter fell from the bright red lips of Mary Byrd. "It sounds as depressing as the last rose of summer," she cried, "and it's just as certain to be left on the stem--" Then she broke off, still pulsing with merriment, for the door opened slowly, and the last violet entered the room. _ |
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